Defensive end Jared Allen, who has played his last six years in a Minnesota Vikings uniform, will now be packing up his services and heading over to the division rival Chicago Bears. There is no way Matt Cassel is pleased with this transaction.

Allen has been downright unstoppable in his established ten year NFL career, falling below ten sacks in a season just twice, and one was his rookie year in Kansas City where he fell one sack shy of the mark with nine. He peaked in 2011, his age 29 season, bullying offensive tackles with his complete repertoire of moves and combined that with his freshly developed veteran awareness/experience. There has been very little falloff since then, tallying 23.5 sacks with 3 forced-fumbles and 69 tackles in the past two years. Read the rest of this entry »

Some have success in the offseason while others get burned. Photo by: Eric Nichay

Free agency is not completely a science, it’s just as much an art form as well. Teams search far and wide for the exact player that they want to stick into their system. The amount of factors that play into the free agency process is immeasurable. And just like a fingerprint, no two players that enter free agency are exactly the same. Some teams get burned while others flourish. I will give a simple example of an individual situation that displays the utter randomness of the business:

The track is bustling with excitement and anticipation. Everyone has their ticket in hand and eyes forward as the horses make their way to the starting gate. Each horse starts from the same place but has a different approach to the race. But none catch your eye quite like the dark horse. The one nobody had accounted for up until now. The one people scout out of the corner of their eye. Something about it, incessantly just keeps you from looking away.

As the month of March is coming to a close, the free agency period of the NFL is roughly half over and team identities for next season are slowly but steadily starting to develop. One team not being talked about, that should carry serious consideration for everyone’s dark horse pick is the Arizona Cardinals.

Teams get down to business as they try to “right the ship” in these few crucial months. Photo by: Eric Nichay

Week one of the NFL free agency period has now concluded and it’s time to assess what teams are getting better from their acquisitions and what teams are setting themselves up to fail. It is easy to be fooled by the names on paper and overpay for a free agent. Sometimes the perception of a player lasts longer than his actual abilities. If a player has been known as a stud for his team and the fanbase in the new city likes him and is maybe pushing for the team to sign him, then that player has a higher chance of being overpaid on the open market. Believe it or not, this is a common occurrence in the NFL. Players get cut from teams every year because the back-end of their contract is far more expensive than they realize the player is worth. Teams simply write clauses and loopholes into these contracts so that they can cut the player as easily as possible when they need to create more cap space.

That however, is only a problem for teams that lose on their gamble at free agency. For every loser during the month of March, there is another team on the opposite end of the spectrum that vastly improved and strengthened their roster. The best teams even sign core players. “Core player” is really just a fancy way of saying the athlete is a game-changer. Players with elite skillsets, in the most elite league in the world, tilt the scales in their team’s favor regarding the ultimate goal of every franchise entering the season – just get to the playoffs.

It’s only fitting that my first post for The 5th Quarter is about the New York Jets, one of two NFL teams situated inside the media capital of the world, the big apple. The Jets, who are desperately thin on offense after an unflattering 8-8 finish – and were considered a longshot to even win that much – are now in the market for a quarterback to push and mentor Geno Smith, their future of the franchise.